ART CITIES:N.York-T. J. Wilcox

T.J. Wilcox’s work is characterized by a fascination with personal narrative and the ways in which history is always under construction, woven from fact, myth, memory, associations, and the bombardment of information we all receive on a moment-to-moment basis. His poetic films collage fact, fiction, myth, memory, and fantasy, creating vignettes that infuse the immersive spectacle of cinema with the intimacy of a short story.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

T. J. Wilcox in his solo exhibition debuts “Spectrum”, a six-part silent film based on different colors of the rainbow. In its installation, each hue blends together and elaborates a figure or event that has been seminal to the artist’s experience in becoming an artist and as a gay man. The works in this exhibition explore the artist’s maturation and identity in ways that are both deeply personal and universal. Alongside the film, Wilcox presents a series of new photocollages on silk based on the video works that comprise “Spectrum”, adding this new material to his expanding practice. Drawing from a range of cultural sources, from documentary to mythic, the single projection film investigates Wilcox’s cathexis towards objects of popular fixation and their significance in the formation of the artist’s queer identity. With “Hyacinth and Apollo” and “Taglioni’s Dance”, Wilcox references figures engaged in the act of preservation, of cultivating their own legends. Both Apollo’s invention of the hyacinth to memorialize his lover and prima ballerina La Taglioni’s habitual reenactment of her starlit dance over the snow parallel Wilcox’s process of reconstructing a memory through the use of emblematic imagery. In the works that derive from documentary sources, “Garden in Hell”, “Grapefruit”, and “Green Carnation”, Wilcox similarly manipulates significant anecdotes—gathering archival footage of Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland’s red living room, meditating on green carnations as a stand-in for Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant persona and as a reference to his prosecution for gross indecency, or Yoko Ono’s book of life instructions, in order to deconstruct the process by which history is distilled from embodied living experiences. Often, Wilcox’s evocative images hold queer double-meanings, and the same holds true in “Monarch Butterfly” which follows the eponymous creature, commonly associated with gay men and thought of as delicate and frivolous, as it completes one of the most complex migratory events in the natural world, traveling over 8,000 miles on its paper-thin wings. Exhibited simultaneously as looped videos that are projected onto a long, narrow screen, each film has differing durations. The resulting projection creates a seemingly never-ending viewing experience within the structurally complex exhibition space Wilcox has constructed. The narratives and colors bleed into one another, creating an optically compelling story that can be read or experienced as six different films or a single image. Alongside each film, Wilcox has made a series of multi-ply silk hangings, printed with a photo-collaged images that references the source materials from each new video work. The collages borrow from documentary sources, Wilcox’s own photography, illustrations, and found imagery to construct portraits of the historical subjects or natural world.

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 18/1-22/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com